Through the Notification of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the project “Advisory Services – Program Management for Development and Implementation within the Agricultural Sector” (DCO-PR-18-0293) issued a to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) described a series of information needs and how IFPRI could provide research and analysis that would help the MCC maximize the effectiveness of their agricultural interventions.

This report answers the question:

“What guidelines can be used to identify the types of agricultural investments that have the highest economic return, where “agriculture” is broadly defined to include primary production, handling, storage, transportation, distribution, processing, and retailing?”

Some agricultural investments are commodity-specific, meaning that they increase the productivity of production, processing, or marketing of a single agricultural commodity or a set of closely-related commodities. Examples include investment in cassava breeding, expanding cotton ginning capacity, irrigation for rice production, expansion of cold storage capacity for horticultural exports, or road investment to a region whose main product is maize.

We combine in-person survey data collected in February 2018 with phone survey data collected in June and September 2021 to study how dairy value chains in Ethiopia have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the major dairy value chain connecting farmers in North and West Shewa as well as peri-urban and urban producers in and around Addis Ababa to consumers in Addis Ababa, we applied a cascading survey approach in which we collected data at all levels of the value chain: dairy farmers, rural wholesalers, and urban retailers.

Wheat flour and bread have played a central role in Sudan’s political economy throughout the country’s post-independence history. In 2019, increasing bread prices precipitated the protests that ousted the government of Omar al-Bashir. How has Sudan’s recent political transition and economic circumstances impacted distortions within the wheat value chain? What are the policy preferences of relevant stakeholders for improving the affordability of wheat products and the productivity of domestic wheat farmers?

In situations with imperfect information, the way that value chain actors perceive each other is an important determinant of the value chain's structure and performance. Inaccurate perceptions may result in inefficient value chains, and systematic bias in perceptions may affect nclusiveness.

Driven by increased demand from both local and export markets and facilitated by far-reaching liberalization and privatization policies, the dairy sub-sector in Uganda has undergone significant changes in the last decade. With a comparative advantage in milk production, the southwest of Uganda has started to attract considerable Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in processing capacity, mainly targeting the export market. As a result, processing capacity increased five-fold and dairy became Uganda's third most important export product, coming from negligible amounts a decade earlier.

Amid concerns about the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Guatemala, in January 2020 decreed travel bans from China, which were later expanded to other countries. The country had the first confirmed COVID-19 case on March 13 and the first death on March 15. Some days before that, on March 5, the government had declared a “state of calamity” (Declaración del Estado de Calamidad Pública - Decreto Gubernativo Número 5-2020), which allowed the government to limit some activities,1 and to take different actions2 to protect the health and safety of all persons in Guatemala.

Due to the global pandemic generated by COVID-19 the government of Honduras declared a “state of emergency” in February (“Estado de Emergencia en el Territorio Nacional a través del Decreto Ejecu-tivo Número PCM- 005-2020, 10 de febrero 2020). The country suffered the first confirmed COVID-19 case on March 12th, 2020. The first death was registered on March 26, 2020. This document updates a previous report (Díaz Bonilla, Laborde, and Piñeiro, 2021) on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems in Honduras.

Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, and in more just, resilient, and sustainable food systems for all. This paper uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food systems. The paper uses an adaptation of the food systems framework to organize the evidence and identify where evidence is strong, and where gaps remain.

This study, based on a primary survey conducted in Bangladesh in 2016, assesses the impact of contract farming in broiler production on profits and the adoption of food safety measures at the farm level. It also estimates the determinants for participation in contract farming, finding a farmer’s education and broiler-housing structure to be significant determinants. This study uniquely assesses the association of contract farming with the provision of well-defined food safety attributes.

Agricultural value chains, particularly in the developing world, have been going through drastic changes over the past decades. Differences in world market participation and access to value chain technologies might however have resulted in uneven experiences across countries. In this paper, we explore their impact on prices in the value chain, using the example of two East African countries, Ethiopia and Uganda. We develop a conceptual framework and then validate the model using unique primary price data collected at several levels in the dairy value chains in both countries.

The COVID-19 crisis is having strong impacts on the Egyptian economy, but these impacts differ strongly across sectors.1 Based on scenarios run using a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) multiplier model of Egypt’s economy, COVID-19 is estimated to have resulted in an 8.6 percent decline in Egypt’s GDP during the 4th quarter of FY 2019/20 (April to June). The services sector was hit hardest, falling by 10.9 percent, followed by industry, which contracted by 8.3 percent.

Ghana’s aquaculture sector is among the recent success stories of fast-growing agricultural value chains in Africa south of the Sahara. The sector has also shown its vulnerability, with the infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus spreading through tilapia farms in Lake Volta in late 2018. The global COVID-19 human pandemic reached Ghana in early 2020, affecting the sector directly and indirectly.

Inclusive agricultural value chains (VCs) are potential drivers for poverty reduction, food security, and women’s empowerment. This report assesses the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains. This report focuses on Malawi, one of the six pilot countries of the ATVET4Women; and focuses on vegetable value chains in which some non-formal training sessions have been conducted as of October 2019.

This study presents qualitative findings from an assessment conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute and Cultural Practice, LLC of the African Union Development Agency-New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) Agricultural Technical Vocational Education and Training program for women (ATVET4Women) in Benin, supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

Since the market-oriented Doi Moi reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnam’s livestock sector has experienced rapid growth. Although policies have been implemented at the national and provincial levels to guide this growth in a sustainable manner, blind spots and implementation gaps remain. Through a review of policy documents, grey literature, peer-reviewed journal articles, and key informant interviews, this research seeks to summarize livestock-related policies at the national and provincial levels in Son La, Vietnam.

Climate change is already having a significant effect on agriculture and food security in West Africa. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is proposed as a solution to transform and reorient agricultural systems to support food security under the new realities of climate change. To benefit from the positive gains arising from CSA, a wide scale adoption of CSA technologies and practices is required.

To guide the design of future agriculture and food value chain interventions, this paper combines two existing spatial food and nutrition security typologies and applies them to the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Apart from estimating absolute and relative inefficiencies along the food system from agricultural potential to nutrition, the integration of both typologies resulted in nine unique low efficiency profiles across the territories and major cities of the Greater Kivu region and Tanganyika.

Photo credit: World Bank

It is widely feared that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to a significant worsening of the food security situation in low and middle-income countries. One reason for this is the disruption of food marketing systems and subsequent changes in farm and consumer prices.

Modern marketing arrangements are increasingly being implemented to assure improved food quality and safety. However, it is not well known how these modern marketing arrangements perform in early stages of roll-out. We study this issue in the case of rural-urban milk value chains in Ethiopia, where modern processing companies – selling branded pasteurized milk – and modern retail have expanded rapidly in recent years.

Despite concerted efforts to develop the fisheries sector in many developing countries, fish demand remains poorly understood due to weak and fragmented domestic markets, particularly in Africa south of the Sahara.

Women’s participation and empowerment in value chains are goals that concern many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We use the survey-based project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women’s and men’s empowerment in the abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine VCs in the Philippines. Results show that most women and men in all four VCs are disempowered, but unlike in many other countries, Filipino women in this sample are generally as empowered as men.

This paper explores the spatial heterogeneity in dairy production in the highland production area around the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. We look at how urban proximity – defined as the travel time from the farm to the central market of Addis Ababa – affects the production decisions of Ethiopian dairy farmers. We sampled 870 households from the major rural production zones around Addis Ababa, where villages were stratified according to their distance to Addis Ababa.

This working paper identifies agricultural activities and value chains in Ghana whose expansion is most effective at generating economic growth, reducing national and rural poverty, creating jobs, and improving nutrition by diversifying diets. The Rural Investment and Policy Analysis (RIAPA) model of the Ghanaian economy is used to estimate how increasing production in different agricultural sectors leads to changes in national and household outcomes.1 RIAPA captures linkages between sectors and rural-urban economies, as well as changes throughout the agriculture-food system (AFS).

In this paper, we apply a mixed-method multisectoral diagnostic to examine potential interventions in food systems to improve diets of rural smallholder farmers in Malawi. We examine the entry points for interventions involving public and nonprofit (including both government and development partners) and private-sector perspectives. In addition, we explore the methodological and theoretical requirements for undertaking this type of multisectoral analysis.

Local value-addition in developing countries is often aimed at the upgrading of agricultural value chains, since it is assumed that doing so will make farmers better off. However, transmission of the added value through the value chain and constraints to adoption of value-adding activities by farmers are not well understood.

Policies targeting agricultural value chains impact Tanzanian farmers, so it is important to understand how these policies affect producer incentives and price transmission along the value chain. This research focuses on maize and groundnut value chains, estimating Nominal Rates of Protection (NRPs) along the value chain and analyzing their implications for producers. The results for border NRPs and trade status imply an anti-trade bias in maize; imported maize faces an import tariff, while exported maize often faces taxes.

Value chain development is increasingly perceived as an important approach for agricultural development in developing countries. This paper uses a Rural Investment and Policy Analysis (RIAPA) model for the mainland Tanzania economy to identify the agricultural activities and value-chains whose expansion will be most effective at fostering economic development along four dimensions: generating economic growth in the agricultural-food sector of Tanzania; reducing national and rural poverty; generating employment; and improving nutrition by diversifying diets.

This paper goes beyond the “business” case for agricultural value chain development and presents an economy-wide framework to make the “development” case. We show that there are several key transmission channels that determine the economy-wide impacts of promoting various value chains, including forward and backward economic linkages, price responses, and net employment effects. These impacts all matter for household incomes, poverty, and dietary diversity.

We study post-harvest losses (PHL) in important and rapidly growing rural-urban value chains in Ethiopia. We analyze self-reported PHL from different value chain agents – farmers, wholesale traders, processors, and retailers – based on unique large-scale data sets for two major commercial commodities, the storable staple teff and the perishable liquid milk. PHL in the most prevalent value chain pathways for teff and milk amount to between 2.2 and 3.3 percent and 2.1 and 4.3 percent of total produced quantities, respectively.

Exchange rate policies can have important implications on incentives for export agriculture. However, their effects are often not well understood. We study the issue of foreign exchange controls and pricing in the value chain for Ethiopia’s coffee - its most important export crop. Relying on unique pricing and cost data, we find that coffee exporters are willing to incur losses during exporting by offering high prices for coffee locally in order to access scarce foreign exchange.

Low-income households around the world are particularly vulnerable to shocks, but also the least prepared when a shock hits.

Researchers and policymakers have long understood the benefits of crop insurance but have been consistently disappointed by the poor performance of these programs. Rarely have programs seen sizeable take-up rates without support through large government subsidies, and in many countries, demand has been meager even at prices well below fair-market rates.

This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD). The guides advocate persuasively the integration of gender into VCD programming and raise important issues for designing more inclusive interventions. However, gaps persist in their coverage of gender-based constraints in collective enterprises, the influence of norms on gender relations, and processes to transform inequitable relations through VCD. Guidance for field implementation and links to complementary value chain tools are also limited.

We show theoretically that the presence of basis risk in index insurance makes it a complement to informal risk sharing, implying that index insurance crowds-in risk sharing and leading to a prediction that demand will be higher among groups of individuals that can share risk. We report results from rural Ethiopia from a first attempt to market weather insurance products to existing informal risk-sharing groups. The groups were offered training on risk management and the possible benefits of holding insurance.

In October 2011,the CGIAR program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) organized a jointworkshop hosted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The workshop was designed to identify and address issues surrounding index‐based insurance for smallholder farmers and the rural poor in the developing world. Emphasis was placed on identifying key areas of research and learning for the academic and policy community to pursue.

In this paper we examine which farmers would be early entrants into weather index insurance markets in Ethiopia, were such markets to develop on a large scale. We do this by examining the determinants of willingness to pay for weather insurance among 1,400 Ethiopian households that have been tracked for 15 years as part of the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey. This provides both historical and current information with which to assess the determinants of demand. We find that educated, rich, and proactive individuals were more likely to purchase insurance.

We conduct a framed field experiment in rural Ethiopia to test the seminal hypothesis that insurance provision induces farmers to take greater, yet profitable, risks. Farmers participated in a game protocol in which they were asked to make a simple decision: whether to purchase fertilizer, and if so, how many bags. The return to fertilizer was dependent on a stochastic weather draw made in each round of the game protocol. In later rounds of the game protocol, a random selection of farmers made this decision in the presence of a stylized weather-index insurance contract.

Asymmetry of information is a fundamental problem in agricultural markets. Production contracts remain incomplete if product quality attributes measured by the buying company remain unobservable for the selling farmer. Opportunistic buyers would report lower than actual output quality, negatively affecting farmers’ compensation given it is directly linked to quality. When farmers factor in the buyer’s opportunistic behavior, underinvestment may occur, negatively affecting farm productivity.

Farmers in rural Bangladesh face multiple sources of uninsured risk to agricultural production and household assets. In this paper, we present results from an experimental demand - elicitation exercise in rural Bangladesh to shed light on smallholder farmers’ interest in formal insurance products. We propose a suite of insurance and savings products, and we randomly vary the price of one insurance option (area - yield insurance) and the presence of one of the savings options (group savings).

This paper provides an overview of a research project that assessed the long-term impact of three antipoverty interventions in Bangladesh—the introduction of new agricultural technologies, educational transfers, and microfinance—on monetary and non monetary measures of well-being. This paper begins by setting out the conceptual framework, methodology, and empirical methods used for the evaluation of long-term impacts. It discusses the context of the evaluations and the longitudinal data used.

This paper investigates inclusive growth in agricultural value chains, with a focus on smallholder participation, upgrading behavior, and outcomes related to agricultural productivity, agricultural profits, and smallholder incomes. The purpose of the paper is to advance understanding of inclusive growth by reviewing empirical evidence from twelve agricultural value chains that have engaged and benefited smallholders. The review of evidence focuses on three central questions:

Production, Finance, and Improved Technologies (PROFIT) was a multi-sector value chain intervention in Zambia from 2005-2011. It focused on upgrading retail inputs and services and measuring the effect on beef and cotton value chains. Among the findings were:

- Shifts in approach, emphasis and location during the course of program complicated or invalidated parts of the research plan.

- The combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence presented suggests positive outcomes and impacts for smallholder participants in the project's beef and retail activities.

Producer penalties and bonuses can help reduce the incidence of side-selling and better align farmers' incentives with purchasers'. Bonuses can help ensure that farmers take the necessary measurements to produce the quality characteristics often present in contract farming arrangements. A randomized controlled experiment with milk producers in Vietnam showed that the presence of penalties and bonuses drove farmers to higher input use which resulted in higher quality milk.

The objective of this paper is to summarize available evidence on key questions for the Feed the Future Learning Agenda theme on expanded markets, value chains and increased investments, and document expert opinion on gaps in the scientific literature for this theme that are in most urgent need of attention.

Among the gaps identified are the lack of rigorous impact assessments of value chain interventions. Specifically "the vast majority of the data available measure outcomes that suggest reductions in poverty rather than quantify impacts on poverty."

Weather variations crucially act the wellbeing of farmers in developing countries yet weather insurance is rather rare. I develop and estimate a dynamic stochastic optimization model to assess the impact of weather insurance on the consumption, investment, and welfare for farmers in developing countries. The parameters of the model are pinned down with a combination of calibration and structural estimation using data from Malawi.

Part of the constraints facing contract farming are the lack of proper procedures for measuring quality in production. If the buyer handles quality assurance then they may have an incentive to report that production was of lower quality in order to offer a lower price. The producer knowing this, in turn will lower their expectation to the income from contact farming and be less likely to contract.

Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP) worked with CARE-Bangladesh to assess the impact of the Strengthening the Dairy Value Chain Project (SDVCP) on (1) women’s ownership of assets, men’s ownership of assets, and jointly held assets; (2) gender norms around asset ownership and control; (3) gender norms regarding decisionmaking in these areas surrounding the dairy value chain; and (4) trade-offs and time costs involved in project participation.

This report summarizes the experiences of the consulting firm J.E. Austin Associates in performing value chain analysis and interventions.

- Base project designs on good market analysis and direct them toward market opportunity.

- Conduct direct industry benchmarking to identify, design, and generate stakeholder buy-in.

- Leverage value chain analysis to empower stakeholders to participate in improving their sector competitiveness through sustainable interventions.

We analyze the effectiveness of a new approach in providing weather index-based insurance products to low-income populations. The approach is based on the concept of providing multiple weather securities that pay a fixed amount if the event written on the security (that monthly rainfall at a nearby weather station falls below a stated cutoff) comes true. A theoretical model is developed to outline the conditions in which weather securities could outperform crop-specific weather index-based insurance policies.

This article draws on four contrasting cases of value chain development (VCD) in Nicaragua to assess approaches and tools used in design and implementation. We interviewed 28 representatives from the international NGOs leading the interventions, the local NGOs that participated in implementation, principal buyers, and cooperatives.

The majority of the world’s poorest people live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these households engage in rural farming and subsist on incomes at or below the international extreme poverty line of US$1.90 per person per day (our working definition for the ‘extremely poor’). CARE, Save the Children, and World Vision are applying inclusive value chain development (VCD) among households living in extreme poverty in an effort to catalyse sustained food security.

Smallholder farmers in Zambia comprise 85 per cent of the farmers’ population. Such farmers are regarded as not creditworthy and furthermore their agricultural productivity could be improved. The aim of this paper is to present recent evidence on value chain financing (VCF) as a framework to increase access to agricultural finance for Zambian smallholder farmers. Such financing will act as an enabler to mechanize and, in turn, might improve productivity. Qualitative data collection techniques were followed to provide the results as presented in three illustrative case studies.

This study analyzes the Laiterie Du Berger (LDB)’s milk supply chain and its contribution to strengthening the food security and socioeconomic resources of Senegalese Sahelian pastoral households. Porter’s value chain model is used to characterize the innovations introduced by the LDB dairy in its milk inbound logistics and supplier relationships. A socioeconomic food security index and qualitative data are used to assess the dairy’s supply chain’s contribution to strengthen smallholder households’ livelihoods.

This paper analyses governance structures in Uganda’s smallholder pig value chains by applying the New Institutional Economics framework. It utilises cross sectional and qualitative survey data from randomly selected pig value chain actors in 4 districts. A multinomial logit model is applied to assess the determinants of vertical integration among pig traders. The findings indicate that most relationships at the pig production node of the value chain are based on spot market governance structures supported by personal relationships and trust.

Recent literature suggests that to make value chains in changing agrifood systems in sub-Saharan Africa more inclusive, intermediary institutions should foster coordination. The hub concept has been applied as such an intermediary institution that coordinates advisory services, input supply and smallholder access to markets.

The authors first discuss the value of value chains and how they can benefit from resilience. They follow this with a detailed analysis of the risks and resilience of different components of the value chain and conclude with a discussion of the business of resilience.  

Here is a list of key messages from this paper:

Accurately assessing risk is key to providing appropriately priced loans to rural producers. This paper examines non-parametric techniques for risk scoring to avoid the erroneous rejection of credit-worthy loan applicants. Both parametric and non-parametric techniques were tested against simulated data and then evaluated on microfinance loan applicants in Peru. Because non-parametric techniques impose fewer modeling assumptions, they are able to better predict default.

This paper attempts to inject more rigorous quantitative methods into value chain analysis. Approaches examined include System Dyanimcs (SD) that model flows and relationships between actors with which one can examine the impact of alternative scenarios over time. Agent-Based Models (ABM) model individual farmers, institutions, and social groupings. In SD models, actors are assumed to be the same whereas in ABM models a set of heterogenous characteristics may be defined for each agent.

This toolkit aims to equip value chain development programmers to design effective interventions that reach and impact the very poor. It profiles tools that are particularly applicable in the value chain selection and value chain analysis phases of a project, as well as assessment tools that can be used throughout the project cycle. Many tools are used by value chain development practitioners to guide value chain selection 4 and value chain analysis,5 of which several focus on understanding and benefiting particular populations. 

This Institutional Learning and Change Initiative working paper provides a thoughtful discussion of the statistical assumptions underlying randomized controlled trials as well as guidance for implementation and interpreting results.

This ILRI discussion paper reviews 20 value chain interventions and discusses the econometric techniques used to address the validity of findings. It explores the use of propensity score matching, instrumental variables, difference in difference, regression discontinuity, and randomized controlled trials. Qualitative and participatory methods are also examined with the idea that they may be able to better capture the complexity of value chain processes.

This article puts forward a method for the analysis of constraints faced by developing countries’ smallholder producers. It is consistent with theories of constraints, efficient in terms of cost and researchers’ time, and accessible to a non-technical audience. A hybrid of workshop discussion and individual data collection, it also draws on data and analyses available in most developing countries.

In the past, discussions about food security have typically focused on thequantity of food that people eat rather than the quality.  However, micronutrient deficiencies are becoming increasingly recognized as a serious threat to the health and economic development of low-income populations. As a result, nutrition is garnering more and more attention in the development community.

Wheat is one of the four most important food grains in Ethiopia. As a source of calories in the diet, wheat is second to maize.  In terms of the area of production, wheat is fourth, after teff, maize, and sorghum.  In terms of the value of production, it is 4th or 5th, after teff, enset, and maize, and approximately tied with sorghum. 

Wheat production has expanded rapidly in the past decade.  According to the CSA, wheat production has grown at 7.5% per year since 1995-96 and at 9.3% over the past decade.

The women’s crop tool attempts to elicit women’s and men’s levels of control over important decision making (land allocation, land preparation, use of inputs, weeding, use of labor, harvesting, marketing, use of income) for their main crops. Both qualitative (FGDs) and quantitative (HH survey) measurements can be done to collect sex-disaggregated data on control. This can reveal both women’s and men’s perception of their own control and each other’s control.

Reducing food loss and waste are important policy objectives prominently featured in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. To optimally design interventions targeted at reducing losses, it is important to know where losses are concentrated between the farm and fork. This paper measures farmlevel postharvest losses for three main crops—maize, soy, and groundnuts—among 1,200 households in Malawi.

The second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) challenges the world to achieve food security and improve nutrition by 2030 but food insecurity and micronutrient deficiencies remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight and obesity are rising throughout the world. To attain SDG 2, food systems must deliver more nutritious food to populations. For food systems to do so, value chains for micronutrient-rich foods must be improved, making such foods more available and affordable to consumers.

A major challenge when designing a National Agricultural Investment Plan (NAIP) is deciding how to prioritize between different opportunities, e.g., which value-chains should be promoted over others?

Background

The SELEVER study is designed to evaluate the impact of an integrated agriculture–nutrition package of interventions (including poultry value chain development, women’s empowerment activities, and a behavior change communications strategy to promote improved diets and feeding, care, and hygiene practices) on the diets, health, and nutritional status of women and children in Burkina Faso. This paper presents the rationale and study design.

In an effort to better understand agriculture value chains market needs in relation to CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) learning hubs, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) conducted a market needs study to assess the current situation and find any possible common ground between the East and southern Africa (ESA) PIM learning hub and the needs and expectations of key actors in the market.

In an effort to better understand agriculture value chains market needs in relation to CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) learning hubs, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) conducted a market needs study to assess the current situation and find any possible common ground between the East and southern Africa (ESA) PIM learning hub and the needs and expectations of key actors in the market.